When you set up a new WordPress website, the second thing you do after installing a theme is search for useful plugins. We offer you 10 top plugins you must have on you new website.
WordPress is a well search engine optimized platform. To boost your SEO you may need All in One SEO Pack, which helps with fine tuning of page navigational links, optimizes your titles for Google, generates meta tags automatically, and much more.
This is another SEO plugin that is highly helpful when you optimize your posts for search engines. Using the snippet preview you can see a rendering of what your post or page will look like in the search results, whether your title is too long or too short and your meta description makes sense in the context of a search result. This is only a small part of what Yoast SEO can help you optimize.
Redirection plugin allows to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors. This is one of the best tools to set up redirections in your WordPress website. Read more on redirection in our previous articles: 3 Main Reasons Why You May Need Redirects in WordPress Website and How to Set Up Redirects in Your WordPress Website.
The backup plugin BackWPup Free can be used to save your complete installation including /wp-content/ and push them to an external Backup Service, like Dropbox, S3, FTP and many more. Remember: The most expensive backup is the one you never did!
W3 Total Cache is designed to improve user experience and page speed. It improves the user experience of your site by increasing server performance, reducing the download times and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration. It is recommended by numerous hosting providers.
OptinMonster is a lead generation plugin. It helps you grow you your email list and get more subscribers. OptinMonster allows you to build high converting opt-in forms in minutes. You can choose from 8 different type of opt-ins including: popups, floating bars, slide-ins, sidebar forms, after-post forms, in-line forms, mobile-only popups, and Canvas.
Live Chat Software by HelpOnClick allows you to talk to your website visitors in real time. Human engagement through a live chat can have a positive effect on your website conversions and sales. The plugin allows real-time traffic monitoring, it has multiple engagement options, virtual agent and advanced reporting.
Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting and CAPTCHA.
The WordPress sharing plugin to help people share, save, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google, Reddit, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, and well over 100 more sharing and social bookmarking sites.
NextGEN Gallery is the most popular WordPress gallery plugin. It provides a powerful engine for uploading and managing galleries of images and two front-end display styles (slideshows and thumbnail galleries), both of which come with a wide array of options for controlling size, style, timing, transitions, controls, lightbox effects, and more.
WordPress is a great platform, because there are already thousands plugins for everything that you may need on your website. But if you are starting a new website, the above top WordPress plugins are the basis for you.
When it comes to finding the best WordPress themes for blogs, you will have your work cut out for you. If you have been following the last few blog entries, then you will have noticed the recent discussions about some of the various theme categories, and are probably starting to notice some common themes emerging, especially related to design.
As you may know, the design is one of the most critical aspects of any theme, so choosing the best WordPress themes for blogs, you will have to totally know what you want to accomplish with your blog. Consider this blog for instance, where one of our primary goals is to inform budding website developers and theme customers various techniques and best practices for developing their web site or blog. Your blog may be much more different. Are you trying to build a fan base? Show off your portfolio? Let the world know what you are up to? Ask yourself what the primary goals of your blog are?
Once you have a good idea of what you want to accomplish with your blog, then you will have a clear objective on how to choose a theme from the best WordPress themes for blogs. Among the best WordPress themes for blogs are those that are simple and effective that allow for a good linear format so people can keep track of your posts on a timeline. So really what makes it the best?
Getting your blog to be the best among the best WordPress themes for blogs is going to depend on two things. Your content and your design. This has always been one of the classical design dilemmas, form vs. function and content vs. design. Coming up with a way to organize your material between these two objectives will ultimately determine where you stand among the best WordPress themes for blogs.
Some other things that make up the best WordPress themes for blogs are:
Appearance: What does the overall appearance convey?
Layout: What is the most immediate message on the page?
Plugins: Do you have a Twitter Feed Plugin on your page, stock ticker, a calendar, or some other plugin that is designed to provide some material benefit?
Think about it, what do you think are the best WordPress themes for blogs? You may have thought of it, but one of the things that make a blog good is if it is trending. When a topic becomes popular, it begins to trend, and the active nature of social networks can bring a normal blog post to the next level popularity if it contains material that is popular at any given time, but it also adds a value-added element that gives it an edge on the popular stream, causing it to go viral. As strange as it seems, some of the best WordPress themes for blogs have been dedicated to kittens.